American Kitchen Tales
American groceries got expensive, and most of the advice about it is guesswork. This site is an attempt to answer food-cost questions with actual numbers instead.
What we do here
Every article on this site starts with a question a shopper actually asks — which protein gives you the most food per dollar, whether store brands really save what people claim, or how much a bag of thrown-out produce costs a household over a year — and answers it using published price data rather than opinion.
We work from three main sources:
– The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for retail price data for individual foods across U.S. cities, month by month, going back decades.
– The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), for food composition, portion sizes, and food-loss estimates.
– FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), for the broader inflation and household-spending context that individual prices sit inside.
Every figure we publish names the series it came from. If you want to check our math, you should be able to — and we’d rather you did.
Who writes it
American Kitchen Tales is written and published by American Kitchen Tales.
My background is not culinary. It’s logistics and inventory control — several years spent auditing stock, tracking goods in and out of warehouses, and reconciling what a shipment was supposed to cost against what it actually cost. Food, from that side of the counter, is a supply chain with a price attached to every step.
That’s the lens this site uses. I’m not going to tell you how to cook a roast. I’m going to tell you what the roast costs, how that price has moved over the last five years, and what you get per dollar compared to the alternatives.
I write about U.S. food prices because the U.S. publishes extensive public price data, including decades of detailed food-price information, item by item, that is freely available to anyone who wants to examine it. Almost nobody reads it. That’s the gap this site exists to fill.
What we don’t do
Nothing here is financial, nutritional, or medical advice. It’s price research, and it’s meant to help you make your own decisions at the grocery store.
Our methodology
Our methodology page explains how we collect, compare, calculate, and present food-price data, including the assumptions behind our estimates and cost comparisons.
Get in touch
Corrections, data questions, story ideas, and partnership inquiries all go to contact@americankitchentales.com
